Aussie app store for AI Unleash Live raises $4.75m

A Sydney start-up building an app store for artificial intelligence has been backed by two of the co-founders of Amaysim and by the Australian tech luminary Steve Killelea.

Unleash Live said it had closed its $3 million Series A funding round oversubscribed, having actually raised $4.75 million from the likes of Peter O'Connell and Rolf Hansen, two of the founders of telecommunications company Amaysim, and from venture capital fund Smarter Capital, run by philanthropist Mr Killelea.

Hanno Blankenstein, CEO and founder of Unleash Live, says AI is the multiplier for the human to better take advantage of the visual sense. John Davidson

The start-up, based at the NSW government's Sydney Startup Hub, is developing a video-based artificial intelligence service that will shorten the decision-making time for industries such as construction, mining, transportation and emergency services.

Using artificial intelligence, decisions that once took weeks or months could be made in milliseconds, said Unleash Live CEO and co-founder Hanno Blankenstein.

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Unleash Live is building up an app store of machine-learning models that can take live video streams from surveillance cameras, or pre-recorded videos shot by drones, and do such things as count the number of hard hats worn at a building site to detect potential safety issues, or identify trucks on a mining site to check they're running to schedule.

Those machine-learning models can be plugged into the Unleash Live service, which takes customers' video feeds over the internet, applies the models to them, and then notifies the customer when something of interest happens, all within 100 milliseconds of the event being captured on video and ingested by the service, Mr Blankenstein said.

A machine-learning model that can detect sludge could be used in a system that uses video cameras to watch the pipes leading out of a mine site, and automatically shut those pipes down the moment it sees an unexpected outpouring of tailings.

All based on eyesight

Or the service could just notify engineers on the site, and provide the video of the event for them to analyse.

The Unleash Live app store will have AI plugins that can detect things like crowds, employee safety and truck movements.

Customers can either develop their own machine-learning models, by feeding around 600 minutes of video into the Unleash Live system and teaching the system what to look for, or just use pre-built models in the app store, he said.

Mr Blankenstein, a 41-year-old former business consultant who also writes software (as a teenager he wrote a plug-in for Microsoft's Flight Simulator, which he later sold to Microsoft), said that the visual processing abilities of Unleash Live – its ability to ingest, analyse and distribute video from multiple sources in milliseconds, faster and more accurately than humans can process visual data – will be the key to its success.

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"When we looked at an eagle or a cheetah, the animals with incredibly fast decision-making powers, it's all based on eyesight," he said.

"We humans don't have this magnificent eyesight that animals have. AI is the multiplier for the human to take advantage of the visual sense, better."

Videos of all the events detected by the AI apps on the Unleash Live platform would be forwarded to customers, either to keep them in the decision-making loop, or to check that the AI engine was making the right decisions.

Getting that balance right, figuring out when humans should stay in the decision-making process, aided by computers, and when computers should be allowed to make decisions for themselves, is a hot topic in AI circles.

Mr Blankenstein said he hoped his company would help shape that debate: "The role of the human changes, from doing routine and laborious work, to supervising and making decisions. We still have a role, the humans, but [machines] are deciding faster and with higher quality."

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John Davidson is an award-winning columnist, reviewer, and senior writer based in Sydney and in the Digital Life Laboratories, from where he writes about personal technology. Connect with John on Twitter. Email John at jdavidson@afr.com.au